Processes

Project HEADWAY is a full life cycle project management process and it is the essential connective tissue that will hold each of your development projects together. It tells you what should be done, when to do it and provides a broad range of advice and examples on how it should be done.

Projects are all about change and the project manager is the person who is often leading that change. Depending on the project, the change may have a small or a huge impact on the way individuals, groups and the organization perform their work. Managing this change is a key component of project management that is often overlooked. Change HEADWAY provides a step-by-step approach to assist the project manager with the change process. Manage the change; don’t let the change manage you!

Organizations often undertake the wrong projects and fail to understand if the projects they choose actually provide the expected outcomes. The Portfolio HEADWAY process is a project-focused step-by-step process that will help your organization to select the right projects, manage those projects well and, realize the expected benefits. Put Portfolio HEADWAY to work for your organization.

How do you select the right application for your project from among all those packaged applications sitting on a shelf at the Super Computer Warehouse? The Application Solution Process provides guidance in evaluating, selecting and deploying commercial, off-the-shelf application packages according to business strategies and requirements. It is ideal for those who must replace an obsolete package or system with a more cost-effective, logical or comprehensive solution.

Business reengineering is one aspect of the cycle of enterprise change, and also includes Enterprise Engineering Assessment and Strategic Visioning. Although business reengineering can be initiated independently of other activities, it optimally begins with an Enterprise Engineering Assessment. This is a high-level and fast-paced assessment of the various business components of the enterprise.

Business reengineering is about change, but it is also about balance--balancing customer needs and operational performance to achieve business goals and objectives. Let this plan show you how to achieve balance on your BRE project.

The data I need is out there somewhere, but how do I find it? Data Warehousing provides easy access to the right data at the right time to the right users so that the right business decisions can be made. The Data Warehouse Process is a prescription for identifying strategic business information, collecting it from diverse, enterprise-wide sources, organizing it for instant access to all levels of users according to their specific needs, and implementing the architecture that makes it all possible.

Are you putting together a data warehouse? This Microsoft Project plan will help you keep tabs on all the complex stages and steps involved in building decision support systems and a knowledge-based applications architecture and environment.

The Distributed Application Process will help you harness the power of an object oriented (OO) design approach, OO implementation tools and distributed computing technologies to build business systems based on user-friendly interfaces, tiered architectures, shared data, reusable components and incremental upgrades to functionality. Distributed computing systems are easily scalable to accommodate business growth and enable users to be productive quickly with each release.

The Emergency Fix Process provides guidelines for the short-term aspect of system maintenance: how to identify, solve and prevent emergency malfunctions, and how to assess the scope and long-term impact of emergency solutions, positioning them to ensure future problem avoidance. The major activities of this process include tracking a reported problem to its source; designing, implementing and testing an immediate (and preferably permanent) solution; analyzing the extended impact of the fix on the system, on other related systems and on ongoing systems development; and taking measures to prevent the same or similar problems from occurring in the future.

Information Engineering (IE) is a full lifecycle development process that applies a tiered approach to business analysis; the business as a whole is analyzed for candidate business areas which yield candidate business systems for development. The business system of choice is designed, built and deployed using advanced tools and techniques to ensure the successful development of complex integrated systems within an overall architecture.

Do you need to develop a plan for implementing business systems to support business needs? Are you in the market to establish an information strategy based on the evaluation of your business strategy? If you need to establish a technical strategy for the best use of new information technology, this is the right place to look. Check out this process!

Timing is everything, even in project management. The key to a successful project is to use JPACE--that is, to Justify, Plan, Activate, Control and End it the right way. This Microsoft Project plan will help you do just that.

The Maintenance Process provides guidelines for the long-term enhancement aspect of system maintenance: how to assess and design system upgrades resulting from business changes; how to build and test the upgraded system to assure that it satisfies the new business needs; and how to transition the upgraded system seamlessly into the current production environment.

Do you CRM? The Siebel Process enables an enterprise to meet its Customer Relationship Management requirements through customization and implementation of the Siebel Enterprise Application package based on its particular business requirements. It guides you through selecting Siebel modules, customizing and testing preconfigured components according to end-user requirements, and rolling the customized application out to the user community.

Are you implementing the Siebel Enterprise Application in an organization? This Microsoft Project plan serves as a project guideline for customizing and implementing the Siebel package to address an organization's CRM requirements.

The Need for Speed - The Rapid Application Development process delivers a system very quickly by focusing on implementing a single business system design area, a prioritized subset of the set of business areas that comprise the enterprise as a whole. The RAD approach is most suitable for small, focused projects with well-defined data and feasible technical architecture requirements. RAD optimizes project speed through such management techniques as prototyping, timeboxing and iterative development.

Rapid Application Development (RAD) is designed to deliver systems very quickly. Project scope, size and circumstances all determine the success of a RAD approach. Use this Microsoft Project plan for your RAD project.

Value Stream Assessment is a high impact, short term, low cost approach to examining an enterprise's business problems with the objective of rapidly identifying a comprehensive solution based on value streams. This shifts the business from being driven by internal operations to being driven by customer needs and satisfiers. It provides high-value feedback to the executives about the business vision, management's alignment with the vision, and the strengths and weaknesses of the enterprise relative to achieving the vision.

Value Stream Assessment (VSA) is an approach used to assess the strengths and weaknesses of an enterprise's value stream(s) for the express purpose of creating a value stream-driven solution. This Microsoft Project plan will help you do just that.

Building a new Intranet? Don't know where to start? The webWAVE Intranet Development Process guides you through building your first internal web. This approach focuses on knowledge management and building the key customized applications which are important to your organization's future.

The webWAVE Development project plan in Microsoft Project offers your intranet development team a blueprint for establishing a corporate communications vehicle that can streamline business processes, allow increased access to corporate information and revolutionize knowledge sharing--while reducing overall communications costs.

Is your intranet a dinosaur? A corporate intranet must keep pace with the rapidly changing, improving technology of the Internet in order to serve its business community effectively. The webWAVE Ongoing Intranet Development Process offers a structure for decision making and prioritization to facilitate updating and enhancement of a private intranet.